“Of course, passages like this one, in which God “speaks,” are rarely taken seriously, much less historically, in academic circles.”
Anyone who does that does so at their own peril.
bkmk
Oh you poor people of the Talmud/Bible, don’t you know that the BOOK is only propaganda to perpetuate the white patriarchy? History, like climate change, is settled science! You know, like 1950s geology and anthropology and astronomy and ...
Do I really need a ‘/sarc’ tag here?
Fear of the Lord? Yeah, buddy ... it gets real in Jeremiah.
Someone ask Brian Williams. He was there.
The Liberal/Progressive "knowledge base" appears to ignore and/or erase any reference to, or acknowledgement of, the Source of all wisdom; therefore that supposed "knowledge base" is empty and illusory.
Read the following words from Dr. Russell Kirk:
"A Michigan farmer, some years ago, climbed to the roof of his silo, and there he painted, in great red letters that the Deity could see, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” These words are on that roof yet. When in his cups, which was often enough, that farmer thrashed his daughter to fill her with a holy terror."In his way, I suppose, the drunken brute did fear God. Surviving the thrashings, his daughter grew to be a woman; and though she did not much fancy her father’s company, she lived as decent a life as most. Her upbringing, bad though it was, may have been better than the formative years of the average American child nowadays, “permissively” reared. To the permitted brat with the permissive parents, few appetites are denied, and he grows up ignorant of the norms of human existence. Never learning in childhood that certain things exist which we ought to fear, he slides into physical maturity, bored, flabby in character, and moved by irrational impulses toward violence and defiance, the consequence of a profound disorder in personality.
"Without a knowledge of fear, we cannot know order in personality or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition. Fear lacking, hope and aspiration fail. To demand for mankind “freedom from fear,” as politically attainable, was a silly piece of demagogic sophistry. If, per impossibile, fear were wiped altogether out of our lives, we would be desperately bored, yearning for old or new terrors; vegetating, we would cease to be human beings. A child’s fearful joy in stories of goblins, witches, and ghosts is a natural yearning after the challenge of the dreadful: raw head and bloody bones, in one form or another, the imagination demands. From the great instinct to survive, to struggle, to triumph, comes the urge to contend with fear.
"And there are things which rightfully we ought to fear, if we are to enjoy any dignity as men. When, in an age of smugness and softness, fear has been pushed temporarily into the dark corners of personality and society, then soon the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return. To fear to commit evil, and to hate what is abominable, is the mark of manliness. “They will never love where they ought to love,” Burke says, “who do not hate where they ought to hate.” It may be added that they will never dare when they ought to dare, who do not fear when they ought to fear.
"Time was when there lay too heavy upon man that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Soul-searching can sink into morbidity, and truly conscience can make cowards of us all. Scotland in the seventeenth century, for instance, tormented itself into a kind of spiritual hypochondria by an incessant melancholy fawning upon the Lord’s favor. But no such age is ours."
Read more.
“The arrowheads provide the answer. A type known as Scythian arrowhead, these were “‘fairly commonplace’ in battle sites from the 7th and 6th centuries BC and were known to be used by Babylonian warriors.””
Well, they were more frequently used by Scythian warriors, who were raiding the middle east quite successfully in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, even to the borders of Egypt, including Israel.
bump
I am never surprised when it is validated - but no amount of historical validation will suffice for inveterate skeptics. It is a matter of spiritual faith.
The “myth” of the Hittite Empire was once cited as the main reason to dispute the historicity of the Bible. Then they discovered Hattushah, its capital city. Oops.
Did they then issue a mea culpa, and accept the historicity of the Bible? No. They moved on to another convenient pretext to discount it.
This is incredible for me. I knew it! And why was Jerusalem invaded and conquered? Because every nation that legalizes child sacrifice is eventually conquered. God’s red line is making it legal.
“Surely at the command (mouth) of the LORD it came upon Judah, to remove them from His sight because of the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he had done, and also for the innocent blood which he shed, for he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood; AND THE LORD WOULD NOT FORGIVE.” (All caps mine)
Manasseh repented in Babylon and was reinstated. His grandson? Josiah. Great revival.